On the other side her
bed was bounded by the window: she had the street beneath her eyes, and
would read in it from morning to night to divert the tedium of her life,
like a Persian prince, the daily but immemorial chronicles of Combray,
which she would discuss in detail afterwards with Francoise.
I would not have been five minutes with my aunt before she would send me
away in case I made her tired. She would hold out for me to kiss her sad
brow, pale and lifeless, on which at this early hour she would not yet
have arranged the false hair and through which the bones shone like the
points of a crown of thorns--or the beads of a rosary, and she would say to
me: "Now, my poor child, you must go away; go and get ready for mass; and
if you see Francoise downstairs, tell her not to stay too long amusing
herself with you; she must come up soon to see if I want anything."
Francoise, who had been for many years in my aunt's service and did not at
that time suspect that she would one day be transferred entirely to ours,
was a little inclined to desert my aunt during the months which we spent
in her house. There had been in my infancy, before we first went to
Combray, and when my aunt Leonie used still to spend the winter in Paris
with her mother, a time when I knew Francoise so little that on New Year's
Day, before going into my great-aunt's house, my mother put a five-franc
piece in my hand and said: "Now, be careful.
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